How to Leverage AI to Boost Your SEO Efforts and Stay Ahead of the Competition

As a professional who is on a search engine optimization (SEO) mission, I’ve been fascinated with the advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years. While AI is certainly not a new concept, the ability of SEO experts to leverage its magic is.

Having helped numerous clients with their SEO efforts with AI, I can confidently state that AI is important for entrepreneurs to stay ahead of the competition. That’s exactly what this article is about. Let’s take a closer look at some key tools and strategies you can use for greater SEO success.

Related: 4 Ways This SEO Expert Uses AI to Create Content — and How You Can, Too

The potential of AI in SEO

AgilityWriter, NeuronWriter, Bing AI, OpenAI’s Playground and ChatGPT, Perplexity AI and so many other AI tools out there offer businesses greater, faster and streamlined opportunities to maintain a competitive edge.

From personal experience, AI can help with SEO efforts, including simplifying the process of creating compelling content by:

• Helping with A/B testing

• Optimizing metadata

• Offering suggestions for catchy headlines

• Analyzing data and identifying trends

• Creating incredible graphics

• Predicting how SEO fixes may perform

• Generating ideas and article outlines

• Paraphrasing content

• Checking for spelling and grammar errors, etc.

As AI technology becomes more widespread and accessible to the public, it’s time to integrate AI into your SEO strategies before you miss the bus. Let’s see how this can be done.

How to integrate AI into SEO strategies

First things first, there is good news. If you’re ready to proceed with integrating AI into your SEO, you don’t have to do a massive overhaul in one go. Instead, you can adopt a gradual AI implementation strategy with small investments. This is a good idea because it can give your business good levels of experience as you develop your capabilities for working with AI over time.

For example, AI can help you with your SEO efforts by:

• Analyzing user behavior and preferences

• Identifying areas for improvement in your current SEO practices

• Testing different approaches to determine what works best

Related: 5 Free AI Tools That Can Take Your Content to the Next Level

AI-driven SEO strategies

A primary goal of all SEO specialists, including myself, is to increase rankings. With AI SEO tools, this is now a much faster and easier task. Here are five tools I use when helping clients:

1. AgilityWriter: With AgilityWriter, you can provide the tool with your topic and keywords, and it generates an outline and an article. It’s fact-based and provides resources. It can also generate metadata for you. Furthermore, it can sometimes provide you with internal and external links to help your link equity.

2. NeuronWriter: You can feed your already-written article into the tool. Then, you can select the leading competitors for your chosen keyword. The article’s use of keywords is evaluated against competitors, enabling you to optimize the article for keywords your competitors have used but you haven’t. It can also generate a meta title and description for you. In addition, you can get a score for the top-performing article and work on improving your score so that it beats the leader in the niche in terms of keyword optimization.

3. Bing AI: Bing AI offers three primary options in its browser. These are “Chat,” “Create” and “Insights.” It can provide resources and answer queries in addition to a multitude of other things, such as generating images based on text. With written responses, you can select the tone of voice, format and length. Meanwhile, predictive text enables much faster writing results by simply hitting the tab key and selecting the predicted word.

4. OpenAI Playground and ChatGPT: These tools are excellent for creating tables, generating content ideas, creating article outlines, comparing texts, identifying and researching high-ranking keywords, researching niche topics, etc.

5. Perplexity AI: This tool is great for checking facts, information and statistics. And what else is great about it? It provides links to sources, helping writers in the content creation process while ensuring a more factually accurate piece of writing.

While these are just a handful of examples of AI tools that can be used in SEO, I hope you can see how they can save you and your team a significant amount of time and effort. Small businesses can really benefit from these tools, many of which have extensive functionalities including analyzing user behavior and search patterns, gathering competitive data and leveraging AI for data-driven decisions that continuously improve your SEO efforts.

Related: How Can AI Improve SEO?

Challenges and solutions

Using AI tools for SEO doesn’t come without its challenges, though. Among the most important ones I have encountered are a lack of in-house expertise and data privacy and security concerns.

To counter these challenges, my advice is to choose AI-driven SEO tools that provide clear explanations of their algorithms and methodologies. In addition, you need to openly address communication challenges with your team and clients about managing expectations when it comes to the role of AI in your SEO efforts.

It’s undeniable: AI tools for SEO can significantly boost your efforts to climb rankings and produce higher-quality content in a fraction of the time. Integrating these tools into your strategies is not only next-level, it’s necessary to enable you to compete. While AI tools do come with certain challenges and shouldn’t be solely relied on to produce results for you, they can enhance your efforts, optimize them, and help you achieve your organic traffic and ranking goals.